A video by John Waldron shows the stolen Horizon Air Bombardier Q400 turboprop plane passing overhead on Aug. 10. (John Waldron via KING5 / Twitter)
After a three-month investigation, the FBI has concluded that Horizon Air employee Richard Russell acted alone when he crept into a secure area of Sea-Tac International Airport, stole an airplane and took it on an joyride.
Investigators also said today that Russell crashed the empty Horizon Air Bombardier Q400 turboprop plane intentionally on remote Ketron Island, southwest of Seattle in Puget Sound. About six seconds before impact, Russell pushed the plane’s control column forward to hasten the end, the FBI said.
This molecular visualization shows how proteins are assembled like building blocks. (UW Illustration)
Researchers have created molecular building blocks that can weave themselves into long threads of protein.
Well, maybe not all that long. Each protein-based building block measures only a nanometer in length, and the self-assembled filaments get about as long as 10,000 nanometers. It’d take more than 2,500 of those filaments, laid end to end, to amount to an inch in total length. Nevertheless, the feat described in this week’s issue of the journal Science demonstrates the power and beauty of protein design.
“Being able to create protein filaments from scratch — or de novo — will help us better understand the structure and mechanics of naturally occurring protein filaments and will also allow us to create entirely novel materials, unlike any found in nature,” senior study author David Baker of the University of Washington said today in a news release.
The satellite coverage scheme described in a patent application envisions two sets of satellites orbiting in different inclinations at different altitudes. (PatentYogi via YouTube)
SpaceX wants to lower the bar for its first batch of Starlink broadband satellites, with the aim of beginning deployment by the end of 2019.
The revised plan is laid out for regulators at the Federal Communications Commission in filings that seek a lower orbit for 1,584 of the more than 4,400 satellites it envisions launching. The new target orbit would be 550 kilometers (342 miles) in altitude, as opposed to the 1,150-kilometer (715-mile) orbit described in SpaceX’s initial round of filings.
Those spacecraft, which were built at SpaceX’s satellite development facility in Redmond, Wash., have been undergoing testing for months. Some observers wondered why the Tintin satellites weren’t sent into a higher orbit as planned — and the revised constellation plan could provide an explanation.
Chris Liddell, White House deputy chief of staff for policy coordination, discusses tech policy during a Washington Post mini-conference.
In the wake of Nov. 6’s power-shifting midterm elections, the White House plans to stay the course in tech policy and may even work with Democrats on beefing up the nation’s broadband infrastructure, a trio of Trump administration officials said today.
“We’re on the biggest IT transformation of all time,” said Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft executive who currently serves as White House deputy chief of staff for policy coordination. “I’ve worked inside the private sector for most of my life, for large companies, 100,000 people or so, but this is for literally millions of people. That’s a 10-year journey. That really hasn’t changed as a result of Tuesday.”
Liddell and two other White House officials — Abigail Slater, special assistant to the president on technology, telecom and cybersecurity policy; and Michael Kratsios, deputy U.S. chief technology officer — sized up the road ahead at Technology 202, a D.C. mini-conference presented by The Washington Post.
A picture taken from the International Space Station shows Japan’s robotic HTV-7 cargo ship being released from the station’s Canadian robotic arm. (ESA Photo / Alexander Gerst via Twitter)
A balky computer system is working again on the International Space Station, thanks to a reboot, the Russian space agency reported today.
“The system was tested for one and a half turns of the station’s flight around the Earth (about two hours),” Roscosmos said in an online update. “In fact, all systems tested out properly.”
The computer, one of three redundant systems, crashed earlier this week. The other two systems continued to operate normally, and operations on the orbital outpost were unaffected. Roscosmos said there was no need to replace the system that suffered the glitch.
Roscosmos didn’t go into detail about the cause of the computer crash.
Semantic Scholar is one of the projects pioneered at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. (AI2 Photo)
You wouldn’t use an academic search engine to look for cat videos — but if there’s a video with cats in it that goes with an academic paper, the latest version of Semantic Scholar just might find it for you.
Semantic Scholar is the AI-based search engine that’s been developed by the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, specifically to sift through research for the most relevant results.
Over the past three years, the project has indexed more than 40 million research papers. Now AI2’s researchers have turned their algorithms loose to link those papers to associated presentation slides, Github code libraries, summaries of clinical trials, news articles, blogs, social-media postings and videos.
Blue Origin’s Rob Meyerson speaks at the 2016 International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in New Mexico. (ISPCS via YouTube)
Rob Meyerson, who was the president of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Originspace venture until this year, says he’s left the company.
Since January, Meyerson has served as senior vice president, in charge of advanced development programs such as the Blue Moon lunar lander system and the New Armstrong interplanetary-class rocket. In an email, he told GeekWire that Nov. 2 was his last day at the company, which grew from 10 employees to more than 1,500 during his tenure.
Meyerson said he was “taking some time off to determine my next steps.”
Egan Airships has tested a drone-sized prototype of its Plimp hybrid airship. (Egan Airships Photo)
What do you get when you cross an airship and an airplane? If you’re willing to spend more than $4 million, you could get the Plimp hybrid aircraft that’s envisioned by Seattle-based Egan Airships.
The patented concept calls for mounting a helium-filled balloon on an airframe that has wings equipped with adjustable propellers. The result is a not-quite-lighter-than-air vehicle that rises like the Goodyear Blimp but can cruise like an airplane at speeds of more than 80 mph.
After years of work on the design and prototype testing, Egan is trying to drum up enough interest among potential buyers to move ahead with the years-long process of getting the plane built and certified.
It’s an unorthodox sales pitch: If customers are willing to pay $4 million plus overages, in installments spread out over the course of four years, they’ll get a Plimp Model J aircraft that’s capable of carrying either a ton of payload in cargo mode, or two pilots and eight travelers in passenger mode.
An artist’s conception shows the Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet. (Boeing Illustration)
Boeing says it has issued an operations manual bulletin to address concerns about erroneous readings from a sensor that has been implicated in last week’s fatal crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX 8.
The jet dove into the Java Sea at high speed on Oct. 29, minutes after its takeoff from Jakarta in Indonesia. All 189 people aboard the plane were killed. Safety investigators said that pilots on the plane were dealing with inaccurate airspeed readings and asked to return to the airport just before the crash.
Boeing’s newly issued bulletin focuses on the 737 MAX’s angle-of-attack sensors, or AOA sensors, which are supposed to provide data about the angle at which wind is passing over the airplane’s wings. Boeing said the action was taken after the Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee indicated that the Lion Air jet experienced erroneous input from one of those sensors.
In a statement released late Nov. 6, Boeing said the bulletin directs operators to “existing flight crew procedures to address circumstances where there is erroneous input from an AOA sensor.”
Two years after its launch, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is closing in on a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and sending back pictures that provide one gem of a 360-degree view.
The view is whetting astronomers’ appetite for even closer looks at Bennu, which is currently about 80 million miles from Earth. Over the next few weeks, OSIRIS-REx will carefully survey the quarter-mile-wide asteroid’s terrain as it edges closer. During December, it’ll execute three flybys, coming within just a few miles of the surface. And early next year, it’ll settle into a close-in orbit and conduct a months-long survey.
All that’s just a buildup for the main event: the probe’s descent to the surface in mid-2020 for the collection of samples that will be packed up for delivery to Earth in 2023.
